Cineaste. Fall 2008.

A new issue of Cineaste is always good news, but this time around there's one blaring headline item that'll be newsiest for most Daily readers: "Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium." The Editors explain what they're after in conducting their survey of nearly two dozen critics, some of whom have made their widely respected names primarily in print, others of whom are read and appreciated almost exclusively online, and then add: "We hope that we can also finally put to rest some of the hoarier accusations (often made by ignorant print critics) that Internet criticism is riddled with amateurs who are diluting once-vibrant print standards. While bad writing and sloppiness are all too common in both print and Internet criticism, the list of affiliations in our symposium convincingly drives home the point that, for reasons of both economic necessity and choice, the distinctions between print professionals and online amateurs are loosening, and at times becoming indecipherably fuzzy."

Updated through 9/13.

Andrew Grant has already done a fine job of laying out the issues at hand and mapping many of the participants' stands on them. I just want to add a word of thanks to the Editors and to many of the participants for their generous recognition of the Daily and to note that the conversation will go on - online, of course, but also at this year's New York Film Festival, where I'll have the honor of taking part in the panel "Film Criticism in Crisis?" on September 27.

Marco Abel's longish piece on the "Berlin School" may not be as newsy as all that, but it's an extraordinarily valuable contribution to film criticism in English: "[T]he label has unquestionably become part of the daily vocabulary of German film critics—so much so that discussions of the merits of individual films are often subordinated to considerations of them as examples of this school. That this de-singularization is something neither filmmakers nor more adventurous film critics are particularly fond of is understandable.... I still think the label remains useful because it enables the description and even advocacy of a cinema that otherwise finds itself ignored by a mainstream press more concerned with the latest box office numbers than with challenging its readers to seek out films that actively try to re-envision what German cinema could be(come)." You may remember that Abel interviewed Christian Petzold for the last issue.

Interviews:

• "All of [William] Klein's films reflect his deeply political, profoundly independent-minded sensibility, but they have done so in unmistakably diverse ways." Jared Rapfogel.

• Andrew Hedden: "Battle in Seattle may yet prove the same with its audiences - and as Stuart Townsend explains in the following interview, inspiration is clearly his intention."

• "Given that Dale Kutzera is a self-proclaimed admirer of classical Hollywood, one should not be surprised to learn that his feature-film debut, Military Intelligence and You!, mixes a wartime satire with actual clips from 1940s war films featuring the likes of Alan Ladd, Ronald Reagan and William Holden," writes Doug Cunningham. "The surprise is that the clips don't come from Hollywood films. Instead, Kutzera has unearthed training films produced by the US Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU), a World War II military organization that recruited hundreds of talented studio artists, including actors, directors, and writers, and put them in uniform for the war effort."

"How could a film stir such conflicting emotions - and from exactly the opposite sources where one might expect them?" Karen Backstein on Elite Squad.

"The twin poles of contemporary cinema - the realism of duration, human consciousness and actual place on one end, and the fantasy of CGI, comic-book perspective, with its anyplace-at-all-but-this on the other - might not seem at first blush to suggest a shift beyond where it all began, with the Lumières and Méliès," writes Robert Koehler, who goes on to define what differentiates these seemingly opposing approaches. Then: "It was between 1957 and 1960 when, in Los Angeles, Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick made The Savage Eye (1960), John Cassavetes shot most of Shadows (1959) and, most importantly, Kent Mackenzie made The Exiles. And Mackenzie's film, more than most, is a study in the cinematic twin poles made manifest on screen, since he applies an absolutely rigorous realism to every moment and detail, while casting a sympathetic look at a group of people trying to escape from the humdrum of their daily lives."

"The Visitor is a film about accidental encounters and life-changing incidents," writes Isabelle Dupuis. "Although its bold ambition is to examine the personal repercussions of the US government's increasingly stringent crackdown on illegal immigration in the post-9/11 era, in the end, it is best remembered for its portrayal of a man who gradually opens up to the world and finds new meaning in life."

"[T]he current neglect of [Alain Resnais's] oeuvre as a whole is scandalous," declares David Sterritt. "I hope the situation will start to change now that Kimstim and Kino International have released four neglected Resnais films from the 80s - one flat-out masterpiece, one near masterpiece, one beguiling misfire, and to round out the series, the most God-awful movie he ever made."

"The release of three of Ozu's silent films on English subtitled discs is a landmark moment in film history, even if it means that most of his thirty-four silents, along with those of most of his Japanese colleagues, remain unavailable," writes Catherine Russell. "These three films offer a glimpse of Ozu's early career, and they also offer remarkable insight into the social milieu, the anxieties, and the challenges facing working- and middle-class families during a period of rapid modernization."

Festival reports: Cynthia Lucia and Richard Porton on Tribeca and Richard Porton on the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.

And book reviews:

• Thomas Doherty on Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood: "Wry, production-wise, and hot-wired to the A-list artists, [Mark] Harris is a beguiling tour guide to a sputtering industry forced to retool and recast by a-changing times."

• "In 8½, Fellini's acerbic critic, Carini, complains that cinema (in 1963) lags 50 years behind the other arts," notes Diane Nemec Ignashev. "In Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950 - 1980, András Kovács offers a new take on how cinema not only caught up, but also 'found itself in a distinguished cultural position within Western culture, with filmmakers able to consider themselves the eminent representatives of Western culture.'"

• Robert Gardner's Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film "is not a book as we know it," writes Tom Cooper. "Rather this is an arrangement, both cubist and linear, of early 60s perspectives, documents, reflections, and communiqués about the making of a landmark 'sea change' film."

Update, 9/13: Peter Nellhaus ponders the concept of "film culture."

Posted by dwhudson at September 8, 2008 8:23 AM